2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Jonathan Sheehan Indiana University
156
From Philology to the Fossil:
the Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe
What do philology, archaeology, mnemonics, jurisprudence, oratory, optics,
rhetoric, grammar, ethics, pneumatics, theology and economics all have in
common? All—in the mind of Johann Alsted, a seventeenth-century German
polymath—could be comprehended in the vast encyclopedia of the Bible. That
the Bible was written word of God is only a partial explanation for Alsted’s position.
Unlike previous eras, the seventeenth century gave the motto “there is no book
but Sacred Scripture” a literal twist: the Bible enveloped all literature, for Baroque
scholars, by virtue of the arrangement and disposition of knowledge inside it. Its
pages not only included all the human and natural sciences, but also organized
them and gave them recognizable form. Alsted’s dream of an encyclopedic Bible
was concretized in various forms over the course of the century, from Samuel
Bochart’s Hierozoicon, which provided detailed philological and historical
investigations of Scriptural animals, to nearly innumerable Scriptural geographies.
Read structurally, such works brought an a priori (usually Ramist or neo-Ramist)
organization to the universe of Biblical knowledge. Only in the early eighteenth
century did the Bible itself become an organizational principle, not just for Biblical
knowledge but for knowledge in general. Like the alphabet, the Bible was—in
such works as the massive Berleburger Bible (1726-1740) and the so-called Copper
Bible, the Physica sacra of 1731—an arbitrary system for coordinating and
encompassing knowledge of both theology as well as human and natural history.
If Alsted and other seventeenth-century polymaths placed the Biblical encyclopedia
within a deductive and logically systematic structure of human and divine
knowledge, by the eighteenth-century, the Bible—its complicated and contradictory
histories—itself became the structure. This paper will examine the origins and
consequences of this transformation, focusing principally on the Physica sacra.
This four volume monument—comprising some 800 folio engravings of the natural
history of the Bible, paralleled by two translations and extensive scholarly and
scientific commentary—shows at its clearest the promise and perils of a Biblical
encyclopedia. On the one hand, the Physica sacra provided its readers with a
compilation and synthesis of a field of knowledge whose perimeters had expanded
alarmingly in the last century. Its formal properties in this view gave it a structural
and editorial flexibility in the face of unprecedented acceleration of human
knowledge. From philology to fossils, the Physica sacra promised to cover it all.
On the other hand, however, the very form of such a project had profound
implications for the status of Bible as the premier text in the Western canon. After
all, if the Bible was as arbitrary an organizational principle as the alphabet, how
could one say, in good faith, “there is no book but Sacred Scripture”? Although, as
I will argue, the Biblical encyclopedia could not survive the paradoxes of its form,
the efforts made to produce such texts testify to a profound uncertainty in Early
Modern Europe about the horizons of human knowledge, and a profound sense